The Greek Orator Whose Lost Athenian Speeches Were Recovered From Under an Archimedes Prayer Book

Hyperides (c. 390 – 322 BC) was one of the ten canonical Attic orators — the standard 4th-century AD Greek-scholarly list of the best Athenian public speakers of the classical and early Hellenistic periods. His contemporaries and rivals included Demosthenes (the most famous of the ten), Aeschines, Lycurgus, and Isaeus. Hyperides spoke in the Athenian assembly and law courts for approximately forty years, was substantively associated with the anti-Macedonian political faction throughout the period of Athenian resistance to Philip II and Alexander the Great, and was executed by Antipater after the Athenian defeat at the Lamian War in 322 BC.

He died with his tongue cut out — Antipater’s specific instruction was that Hyperides should not be allowed to speak again.

What was lost

Hyperides was substantively prolific. The ancient catalogues credit him with approximately 77 speeches; the substantive surviving Greek-scholarly tradition through late antiquity actively cited and quoted at least 35 of these. By the medieval transition essentially all of his output was lost. The substantively complete surviving Hyperides text by the year 1800 amounted to perhaps a dozen short quoted fragments preserved in later authors.

The substantive 19th-century recovery began with the 1847 discovery of partial Hyperides papyrus fragments at the Egyptian site of Sheikh Abada — substantively the first direct recovery of any extended Hyperides text since late antiquity. The 1847 finds and subsequent papyrus recoveries through the 1890s gave classical scholarship approximately five substantively partial Hyperides speeches, of varying completeness.

The Constantinople palimpsest

The substantively largest single subsequent recovery came from an unexpected source. The Archimedes Palimpsest — the 13th-century Greek prayer book whose vellum pages preserved earlier scraped Archimedes manuscripts — had been first identified as containing Archimedes material by Johan Ludvig Heiberg in 1906. The manuscript disappeared during the First World War, resurfaced at a Christie’s auction in October 1998, and was bought by an anonymous private collector for $2 million. The collector placed it on permanent loan at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

The Walters multispectral imaging programme of 2000–2008, led by the American computer scientist William Noel and the Stanford classicist Reviel Netz, was substantively concerned in the first instance with recovering the Archimedes underwriting. The programme nonetheless examined every page of the palimpsest systematically. In 2002 the imaging team identified a section of the underwriting on approximately seven palimpsest leaves that was substantively not Archimedes — the script was different, the page layout was different, and the textual content was substantively rhetorical-political rather than mathematical.

Substantive identification of the text required approximately three years of subsequent work by classical philologists. The text turned out to be substantial portions of three Hyperides speeches: a previously-unknown speech Against Diondas, a substantially expanded version of the previously-fragmentary Against Timandros, and several columns of an unidentified third oration. The recovered material approximately doubled the total surviving Hyperides corpus.

What the speeches show

The Against Diondas is a substantively political defence Hyperides delivered around 334 BC, defending an Athenian assembly decree that had honoured Demosthenes for his diplomatic services against Philip II. The text gives substantively the most detailed surviving primary description of Athenian political-procedural practice in the period immediately before Alexander’s eastern campaign. It also substantively documents the Athenian anti-Macedonian faction’s internal political dynamics at a level of detail previously not available to classical scholarship.

The Against Timandros was previously known only from a handful of substantively quoted fragments. The expanded recovered text gives substantively the most complete surviving Hyperides legal speech and substantively the most substantial primary source for 4th-century BC Athenian inheritance law.

The unidentified third speech remains substantively under philological analysis. The substantive working consensus is that it is a previously-unknown private legal oration, probably from the 320s BC.

The Hyperides recovery is substantively the largest single addition to the classical Greek prose canon since the 19th-century papyrus recoveries. It is substantively a direct dividend of the substantive imaging programme that recovered the Archimedes Method of Mechanical Theorems from the same palimpsest. The substantive history of the recovery has now substantively become its own chapter in the broader history of classical-text transmission.